MENTOR, a friend of Ulysses, and the tutor of his son Telemachus, whose form and voice Athena assumed in order to persuade his pupil to retain and maintain the courage and astuteness of his father.

MENZEL, ADOLF, German painter, born at Breslau, professor at Berlin; best known for his historical pictures and drawings; b. 1815.

MENZEL, WOLFGANG, German author and critic, born in Silesia; wrote on German history, literature, and poetry, as well as general history, and maintained a vigorous polemic against all who by their writings or their politics sought to subvert the Christian religion or the orthodox policy of the German monarchies (1789-1873).

MEPHISTOPHELES, the impersonation in Goethe’s “Faust” of the modern devil, the incarnation of the spirit of universal scepticism and scoffing, who can see not only no beauty in goodness but no deforming in iniquity, alike without reverence for God and fear of his adversary, blind as a mole to all worth and all unworth throughout the universe, yet knowing and boastful of knowledge, by means of which he sees only “the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad, but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy is blind as his ancient mother.”

MERCATOR, a celebrated Dutch geographer who has given name to a projection of the earth’s surface on a plane (1512-1592).

MERCENARIES, originally hired soldiers as distinguished from feudal levies, now bodies of foreign troops in the service of the State; the Scots Guards in France from the 15th to 18th centuries were famous, and Swiss auxiliaries once belonged to most European armies; William III. had Dutch mercenaries in England; under the Georges, German were hired and were used in the American War, the Irish rebellion, and the Napoleonic struggle; in the Crimean War German, Swiss, and Italian were enrolled.

MERCIA, one of the three chief kingdoms of early England; founded by Anglian settlers in the Upper Trent Valley (now South Staffordshire) In the 6th century; it rose to greatness under Penda 626-655, subsequently succeeded Northumberland in the supremacy, but after the death of Cenwulf 819, waned in turn before Wessex and the Danes.

MERCURY, the Roman name for the Greek Hermes, the son of Jupiter and Maia, the messenger of the gods, the patron of merchants and travellers, and the conductor of the souls of the dead to the nether world.

MERCURY, an interior planet of the Solar system, whose orbit is nearest the sun, the greatest distance being nearly 43,000,000 m. and the least over 28,000,000, is one-seventeenth the size of the earth, but is of greater density, and accomplishes its revolution in about 84 days; it is visible just before the sun rises and after it sets, but that very seldom owing to the sun’s neighbourhood.

MER-DE-GLACE, the great glacier of the Alps near Chamouni, was the subject of the experiments of Professor J. D. Forbes of Edinburgh about 1843, and on which the movement of the glaciers was first observed.